ALGERIA: What happened
to Algeria's Fighting Women?

What
happens to the women fighters after the victory?
They go back to the kitchen! In Algeria at
least, it is clear that they had no other
future. Djamila Amrane was, almost, one of
them. Born in France in 1939, Danièle
Minne, daughter of a French communist secondary
school teacher, lived almost all her life
in Algeria and joined the struggle when she
was 17, going underground under the nom de
guerre of Djamila.

Arrested and jailed in December 1956, she
was liberated after the independence, in 1962,
and wrote her PhD thesis on the participation
of Algerian women in the war, interviewing
eighty-eight women between 1978 and 1986.
Her thesis forms the basis of a book, Des
femmes dans la guerre d’Algérie
(Karthala, Paris).

When the “war of national liberation”
broke out in 1954, only 4,5% of Algerian women
knew how to read and write. Just 3% were employed
outside the home and only 16% of Algerian
women above 15 were unmarried. There were
only 503 Algerian students at Algiers university
-- of whom 22 were girls. Uneducated and confined
to the home, Algerian women had no rights
whatsoever. Still, almost 11.000 women joined
the struggle. About 2.000 joined the armed
organisation of the NLF but very few
did actually fight, most worked as nurses
or cooks. Some were involved in intelligence,
while others worked as couriers, collecting
money or carrying bombs.

But
in no way can they be compared, for example,
to the Eritrean women who actively participated
in the fighting -- some of them becoming commanders
of tank battalions. Most of the Algerian
women came from the two political parties
that existed before the war: Messali Hadj’s
“P.P.A” (Party of the Algerian
People) and the “P.C.A” (Algerian
Communist Party). While the P.P.A. drew the
“elite” of Algerian intellectual
women, they all tell the same stories of very
conservative families -- and not less conservative
fellow male “moudjahidines” --
who could not imagine women playing a political
role.

As Fatiha Hermouche underlines it, the influence
of the family was decisive. Since girls did
not go out, and had no chance to speak between
themselves about the situation -- even those
who went to school -- the discussions taking
place at home were their only source of information.
If a girl’s father, brothers, or cousins,
were militants, the girls had a chance to
overhear their debates and to make up their
own mind -- although in some families, like
Meriem Madani’s, the “men would
not speak in presence of women”.

Fatma
Baichi was a young girl when she discovered
by chance a place where communists met and
listened to political speeches. She went there
often until one of her brothers saw her there,
he beat her and took her back home, pulling
her by her hair: “She is involved in
politics”, he told his mother. When
Fatma told her mother that he was also a militant,
he announced: “I am a man”. There
was no answer to that. Like many women interviewed
by Djamila Amrane, Fatma was badly tortured
by the French for hiding weapons in her house,
and she did behave... like a brave man.

Yamina Cherrad graduated as a nurse one year
before the beginning of the war, and went
underground two years later, with three other
nurses. For one year Yamina was the only woman
in the district. And she says that she had
“many problems. The main one was that
many fighters did not accept willingly the
presence of a woman. They thought that the
women who joined the fighting did so to find
a husband. They did not understand that we
also wanted to work, to fight”.

Baya Hocine was born in 1940 in a very poor
family from the Casbah in Algiers. She began
working as a courrier at 16. And she remembers
that she was also “doing everything:
I washed the clothes, ironed them, went shopping
and cooked. Meanwhile, the men did nothing,
they were discussing”.

Malika Zerrouki was 15 when she joined the
fighting in 1956. “The bush was my school”,
she often said later, “I learned everything
there”. Working as a barefoot nurse,
she was sent with a small group of other girls
to Tunisia in 1957 by her “colonel”.
Malika tells how it took them three months
to walk to the border, and how terrified they
were trying to avoid the French. Once in Tunis,
they were set up in a villa but told not to
go out. When they protested they were locked
up in the cellar by their fellow NLF fighters.
Fortunately colonel Ouamrane, a hero of the
Algerian war, who happened to know the young
Malika and considered her as his “protégée”,
inquired about her, and as a result they were
liberated.

All the interviews featured in Djamila Amrane’s
book make fascinating reading because the
women telling their stories are writing a
different history of what is now called the
First War of Algeria. Their accounts are different
from the official version later rewritten
by those wishing to glorifying the NLF and
its “national liberation army”.
These women, who today do not belong to any
political party, tell the bitter truth with
a rare honesty. The nurses, like Yamina,
tell horrific stories of amputations with
a saw and without anesthesia. By interviewing
those women who participated in the “battle
of Algiers” along simple village women
who supported the struggle by cooking and
washing for the fidayines, as well as some
of the French women who joined the war on
the NLF side, the author draws a fairly comprehensive
picture of events.

The conclusion however, is bitter: “Most
of the fighters prayed not to be alive after
the independence, because they thought it
would not end well”, says Mimi ben Mohammed,
a nurse. Yamina was disgusted when different
groups started fighting between themselves
in the summer of 1962, after the independence,
and “forgot it all”.

Baya Laribi, another nurse who was arrested
and tortured, had hoped that her fight would
bring “a better life for the people
of the “douars” (villages). Years
later, she went back to see the villages that
had helped her during the fighting by offering
her food and shelter: “I saw that the
wives and the families of the fighters still
lived in the same shocking conditions as they
had before. I was so much ashamed that I did
not go back, I wanted to curl up in a corner”.

Halima Ghomri’s experience was equally
bitter: “The independence? Nothing of
what I had hoped for was achieved. I had expected
that my children would be able to have an
education but they did not get it. We were
poor peasants then, we are poor peasants now.
Nothing has changed. Everything is the same.
The only thing is that we are free, the war
is over, we work without fear -- but apart
from that, nothing has changed”.

Fatma, who went through the worst torture
and detention camps during three years, from
1957 to 1960, was married to a neighbour in
1961. It was a traditional marriage, and even
after the independence her husband did not
allow her to go out. It was only when she
was nearly 50 that her husband finally allowed
her to go out in the street.

In 1957, at the age of 17, Baya Hocine was
arrested and sentenced to death, later commuted
to life imprisonment. Liberated in 1962, she
becomes a journalist and a cadre of the NLF.
But she remains frustrated: “When I
was in jail I was so convinced that when we
go out, we -- men and women --would build
a socialist Algeria together but Algeria was
built without us. We, the women, we were excluded”.

Fatma Bedj, from El Asam, who lost
three children in the fighting, has the bitter
last word: “I did not ask for anything,
not for a pension nor even for a needle. We
worked for the sake of God and for our beliefs.
But now, to tell the truth, I regret it, I
regret my daughters”.